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email lifecycle management

We fielded an interesting call recently. The director of IT at a prestigious University explained that they had migrated all their faculty, students, and staff to Office 365. When asked about PST files, he said yes they had plenty of them, but Microsoft had moved these files to the cloud for them as well. So all his PSTs were in the cloud, he said.

But when we asked if they had moved them themselves, we were told no, Microsoft said PST Capture would do it. After we explained how PST Capture works, that Microsoft gives the tool away but it’s still up to individual organizations to actually use it, there was silence – he realized he still had PST files all over the place. And this was a problem.

The perfect opportunity to manage your data

Whether you are migrating to a Virtual Desktop infrastructure, moving your email to the cloud, or moving from using local Office applications to using Office 365 web applications, a migration offers organizations the chance to clean up and regain control of their data.

Why would any company invest in a brand new system and fill it up with information of no business value, or leave information of potential value behind? Cleaning up and deciding what data should be migrated and retained can help set a precedent for managing that information process more effectively going forward.

PST files are a perfect example of information that should be identified and actively managed prior to or during a strategic IT project such as VDI, migration to Office 365 or Exchange online, or even a BYOD initiative.

A lot is written these days about information management and information governance, and analysts are predicting that effective information management and governance can be a game changer for companies.

Hang on, one might ask – doesn’t this sound a lot like Enterprise Content Management, or ECM? Aren’t there already plenty of successful vendors, ECM installations, and ECM strategies at work across companies at all levels, for many years now?

ECM and IG are not the same

In the world of enterprise content management, everything hangs on the principle that each document is unique, serves a defined purpose, and is therefore managed.

ECM is critical to regulated industries such as pharmaceutical, where even the specific revisions of drug labels must be managed and ECM solutions provide reliable, defensible tools. ECM aids companies who regularly develop collaterals, training materials, as well as mundane activities like tracking contracts, document revisions, and so on.

This is not information governance, however – nor is it information management as the world is beginning to understand it. The ECM world already assumes a one-to-one relationship, which is why ECM has never proven to be a solution for information governance.

Archiving and policy-based retention are not new technologies, although the companies that offer these have provided substantially enhanced products over the years; so much so that today’s solutions satisfy a wide range of customer requirements. As companies worry more about big data, ediscovery and why they’re saving data, the additional benefits of policy-based retention become more apparent.

Why do companies archive email data?

First generation archiving products served a simple purpose: overcome the limitations of mailbox quotas in Exchange and the high cost of disk storage.

Archiving solutions provided some level of retrieval, but were more focused on getting email off mail servers and onto lower-cost secondary storage. For some companies, this was enough, and sufficiently cost-effective that they simply archived everything into seemingly perpetual storage.

Does email fit the definition of Big Data?

By its very nature, email is unstructured. Growing at a staggering volume year over year, email is the transport mechanism for all manner of attachments and it occurs at the speed of communications. That would seem to fit all the definitions of Big Data.

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.

The overall objective of an Information Governance initiative is to apply rules and structure to the management of data as information. The bottom‑up approach meets this objective by implementing a series of individual projects or initiatives that can range from simple retention programs to the identification and management of data that can be defensibly deleted.

We often get customers asking what the difference is between Information Management and Information Governance, and which one do they need – or do they need both? Let’s start by defining what these two concepts actually are:

Information Governance is the set of structures, policies, controls and metrics that specify how the organization’s information is managed as a business asset.

Information Management is the set of individual activities and tasks carried out by an organization in order to organize, retrieve, acquire, secure and maintain information within the business.

We can position Information Governance as the STRATEGY for guiding the management of information, i.e. the what we need to manage and why we need to manage whilst Information Management is more the TACTICS used and howthe information is managed.

PSTs…strategic or tactical problem?

Some people seem to think the issue of managing PST files is a tactical problem and can be resolved by IT alone. One very large company we met recently saw it that way until their legal counsel and compliance teams found out what they were doing (merrily purging data, with reference to them!).

PSTs have been around for 15 years, and any employee can amass a huge amount of data inside them, especially if mailbox limits are low. By low I mean less than 200MB in today’s terms.

We have seen another global company who trying to find PSTs found them scattered across all sorts of fileservers. These were usually PSTs belonging to former employees whose residual data had been processed in different ways over the years.

Both of these companies had more than 50,000 employees and the number of PSTs were well in excess of 100,000 or measured in Terrabytes (TB) of storage.

The PSTs had been created for all sorts of reasons, contained wide varieties of data, some were associated with current users, others were lost to a current employee, others belonged to former employees. The solutions they required were more than “one size fits all”, they needed to analyze their data, keep the business (e.g. legal) people involved in their plans, and produce a campaign for discovering and managing retention of the data.

No surprise that they needed a solution that helped them through all aspects of analysis and recovery.

Commonly known as PST files (or Personal Storage files) they are created by users to store email data when mailbox quotas have been set by their company. Nowadays PSTs are a legal liability as they contain company information that could be used in a case (for or against the company) which may be requested through FRCP or similar laws about production of evidence, or in public bodies through the Freedom of Information directives.

Until recently there have only been a number of cheap tools around to help organizations find or retrieve PST files. Yet the problems are significant. And as with most cheap software it is so because it only tackles some of the problem or does it in a way that doesn’t capture of find everything that is needed. This is actually quite dangerous as FRCP amendments and courts are not being tolerant of only finding part of the data, and the excuse of “it was too difficult” is (rightly) being trampled on with a summary judgements being passed out.

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.

Mailboxes on company mail servers are frequently constrained by certain size quotas. As these quotas are close to being reached because of a large volume of email traffic, the mailbox is likely to issue a notification to its user to take action to preserve the performance of the system. The action called for usually involves a choice.

Users can either choose to sift through their email and find items suitable for deletion to free up space or they can choose to allow the email system to archive older items in personal folders known as PSTs.

The disadvantage of deleting email is simply that it takes a great deal of time to accomplish. Users must identify which items they need to keep and which they should delete. Moreover, this course of action is usually a very short term solution.

However, the creation of PST files of little benefit to the user either. This is because PST files are very difficult to manage. These files go against best practice and are at odds with regulations concerning email retention because they are so difficult to locate and monitor.

The best solution to these issues is to install email archiving software which is equipped to manage and recover these PST files into the archive. Software of this kind automatically archives email that enters the company servers along with existing email and PSTS data, and requires no intervention from users.